– Or – Nothing is Ever as Easy as it Looks
I recently discovered – re-discovered, really – that a glass of wine has a pleasantly relaxing effect on painful muscles and joints. But…more than one glass relaxes those muscles a little too much, making it more likely that I’ll fall down and undo all the good of the first glass. A fine line, indeed. And then there are the calories. Why is it, I wonder, that you have to burn 3500 calories to lose one pound, but only have to eat 20 or so calories to gain ten pounds? Seems largely unfair. Hugely unfair. Bloated with unfairness. Oh, well.
I’ve been walking regularly – 2.25 to 2.5 miles 4 or 5 times a week – to get back in shape, help manage my back pain, and just co-incidentally, take some of the edge off Junior’s boundless energy. Somehow, this is also making me not lose weight. Oh, I know, I’m gaining muscle, but that doesn’t actually show on the scale. It just looks like my weight has not budged in three months. Ugh. Why give up Klondike Bars when there’s no return on it?
I had thought it would be relatively easy and painless to take of some extra pounds once I started walking regularly. After all, it happened once before. I had a part-time job in a lab at the local Vet School. The lab was located on the second floor off a building about three quarters of a mile from the parking lot I was allowed to park in. I walked to the building and up a flight of stairs to get to work, and then back down the stairs to the parking lot when I got off. Ten pounds just flew away. Of course, I was carrying a small back pack at the time with about 3 or 4 extra pounds in it, and was on the ragged edge of menopause at the time. I have no idea if the menopause part had an effect, but I’m about to decide I need to start carrying that back pack again. That’ll be fun when it’s 90 degrees at 7 a.m.
But then, of course, the job ended and my dad died and I ate all those Oreos. And the ten pounds came back. That part was certainly easy enough.
Then there’s this whole computer thing. I seem to be naturally attracted to the hard way to do things. I could just save up and get a new laptop, but I decided instead to get a new memory card to try and speed up this old one. In theory this is supposed to work. In theory, it’s even supposed to be a simple operation.
In theory, this old laptop has enough memory, processing power, and everything else to run a lot more stuff than what I’ve got on here. Only it had been slowing down so much that I found myself duplicating what I had been doing when I first got it – when it had the hated Windows OS installed. I would open my Thunderbird mail program, check my emails, and then close Thunderbird. Then I would open Firefox – or I would launch Firefox and go pour my coffee while I waited for it to open. If I had my music program running when I wanted to look up something on the Internet, I had to remember to pause the song or just quit the program, because surfing the ‘net was not compatible with listening to tunes. Therefore the decision to upgrade the memory.
My laptop had 526 MB of RAM installed, but could be expanded to 2 GB. I figured one new memory card with 1 GB extra RAM would probably be plenty. When it arrived in the mail, my brother offered to install it for me while I was at work, if I could find a set of instructions for him. That part was not a problem. There’s a whole community of Thinkpad users on-line, with links to PDFs of the user’s manuals. So I came home from work to a laptop with over a gig and a half of RAM – that wouldn’t boot up. It would hang up in black screen, or it would hang up at the IBM screen, or it would get all the way to the Ubuntu opening screen before it would hang up. Aahhhrrrrggggg!
I went on-line and signed up for the Thinkpad users forums and posted my question. A moderator came back with a suggestion that I take out the new card, take out the original memory card, and install that one in the “auxiliary” slot. If it still didn’t boot, that would mean the memory slot was bad, and if it did, then the new card was probably defective. I (of course) got the instructions mixed up, because (of course) I had to turn off the computer to work on it. I put the new memory card in the “standard” slot, left out the old card, and started the computer. It worked like a charm. Then I decided to experiment and put the other card in the auxiliary slot. That worked, too. I reported all this on the forum, and the moderator suggested that I should run a memory test on that new card, all the same. Wha?? I guess it seemed kind of fishy to him that it worked that way. So more fumbling around on my part trying to figure out exactly what these people are even talking about, so I could make this test thingy work. Changing parts is not a problem for me. After all, I was a jet aircraft mechanic for four years. But there was a reason I was taking off panels and changing tires and fuel tanks, and not working on the avionics equipment.
Anyway, long story short. I’ve got both those memory cards installed. My laptop works a treat. It’s way faster than it was, and it can multi-task. I can listen to music while I surf the web and I can keep my e-mail open all at the same time. Woo-hoo! I’m such a geek. Sometimes the end result is worth the pain-in-the-ass price.
